Using PowerShell CIM Sessions to Query Dell Hardware

I've been "playing" with some Dell hardware recently and as with everything I like to try and automate as many tasks as possible.

Dell have a really useful tool called Racadm which is a command line utility which you can call from a script to read and write various properties of Dell iDRAC and CMC (Chassis Management Controller).

However, since the latest iDRAC and CMC are built around WSMAN and DMTF standards, I prefer a more PowerShell only approach.

The key PowerShell command for querying is Get-CimInstance. Before we can use this command however we first need to establish a remote CIM Session to the hardware.

This is accomplished by using the New-CimSession and New-CimSessionOption cmdlets.

So...
Use some variables to store the IP, username and password for the iDRAC
$UserName="root"
$Password="calvin"
$DracIP="10.10.0.120"

Convert the username and password into a PS Credential
$SecurePass = ConvertTo-SecureString $Password -AsPlainText  -Force
$DracCred = new-object -typename System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -argumentlist $UserName,$SecurePass

We can then create a new CimSessionOption object, which for the Dell Hardware the below works nicely
$cimop=New-CimSessionOption -SkipCACheck -SkipCNCheck -SkipRevocationCheck -Encoding Utf8 -UseSsl

Then using the above variables and new session object we can create a new CIM session to the iDRAC
$Dracsession=New-CimSession -Authentication Basic -Credential $DracCred -ComputerName $DracIP -Port 443 -SessionOption $cimop -OperationTimeoutSec 10000000


Once we have the session established, we can then use the Get-CimInstance cmdlets to query various properties by passing in a WSMAN/WinRM ResourceURI.

For example, if we just wanted to query the general BIOS properties, we could use the following URI: http://schemas.dmtf.org/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/root/dcim/DCIM_SystemView

That would form the following command (cmdlet - session - resourceuri):
Get-CimInstance -CimSession $Dracsession -ResourceUri "http://schemas.dmtf.org/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/root/dcim/DCIM_SystemView"

Which supplies information like this:

This way if you assign the object to a variable ($BIOSINFO=Get-CimInst ...) then we can pull out specific items within scripts:

Again, you can do similar things with other hardware properties, for example I can use the resource URI for getting the network card information from a server (http://schemas.dmtf.org/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/root/dcim/DCIM_NICView)

Drop this into a command:
$NICS=Get-CimInstance -CimSession $Dracsession -ResourceUri "http://schemas.dmtf.org/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/root/dcim/DCIM_NICView"

... and now we can get the various MAC Addresses of the various NICs
$NICS[0].PermanentMACAddress
$NICS[1].PermanentMACAddress
...
$NICS[6].PermanentMACAddress
$NICS[7].PermanentMACAddress

Hmm... Useful for SCVMM Bare Metal deployment scripting maybe?

The only thing that I struggled with this very simple method of querying the hardware for info, was the resource URI needed.

Well to help with this, the following bits of information from Dell are a god send:

DCIM Profile Library
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/systems-management/w/wiki/1906.dcim-library-profile.aspx

WinRM WebServices for Lifecycle Controller
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/extras/m/white_papers/20066174.aspx


Next time I'll post about using PowerShell to set the values rather than just query them.